To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia during 1968, and in anticipation of next year’s 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Centrala is hosting Eastern Bloc Songs: Party, Pop & Politics, a display based on informal research by Wayne Burrows. The exhibition will feature a broad range of archive materials arranged to tell the story of the development of official popular music cultures in former Eastern Bloc Communist states, gathering EP and LP sleeve art, photographs, posters, ephemera, texts, TV footage and promotional films, all drawn from the back catalogues of state-run record labels in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other Eastern Bloc European states between c.1963 – 1988. The result is post-war pop music’s history refreshed and re-told from a perspective on the other side of its standard Anglo-American, English language looking-glass.

This exhibition and events programme will also be accompanied by a book-length illustrated publication bringing together around 65 translated song lyrics, mainly from Poland and Czechoslovakia, with short introductions to key artists and events, telling the story of popular music’s development in these countries during the Cold War years. Building additional context and background to complement the material in the gallery, Eastern Bloc Songs: Party, Pop & Politics will be launched at the exhibition in early September 2018. Sampling the stylistic range, political complexity and musical quality achieved by artists working under the frequently strained conditions prevailing within official cultures, Eastern Bloc Songs might also offer suggestive parallels for artists today, whose own working conditions have evolved in the years since 1989 (and at an accelerating rate since 2008’s financial market crash) into all-too familiar patterns of ideologically-driven diktat and bureaucratic micro-management.